MAC Addresses are assigned by manufacturers, but you can also give a custom MAC Address to your board. MAC Addresses are made up of six groups of two hexadecimal digits, separated by colons, for example: 30:AE:A4:07:0D:64. Python 3.3 added a ipaddress module this module does not however include a utility to generate an IPv6 address from a given MAC address.MAC Address stands for Media Access Control Address and it is a hardware unique identifier that identifies each device on a network. Sometimes you can express an algorithm in a very concise and readable way, but avoid code-golfing for the sake of compactness. In Python, we usually don't strive for shorter code we aim for readable code. I followed the PEP 8 whitespace recommendations to format the code here whitespace around operators and after commas, for example. # XOR the most significant byte with 0x02, inverting the # Split out the bytes that slot into the IPv6 address # Remove the most common delimiters dots, dashes, etc.

In this case, I'd actually split out the various bytes of the MAC address binary value that make up the IPv6 parts, and use str.format() to interpolate those into the IPv6 string.

Use the format() function instead, as it gives you much more control over the output.įor example, format(value, '012x') formats the integer value to a 12-digit hexadecimal (using lowercase digits), padding out the result to the minimum width with leading zeros as needed: > mac_value = 0x237702d2ff9b Note that the purpose of the hex() function is to produce a hexadecimal integer literal (a string that can be used in Python source code), which is why it returns a hex value with the 0x prefix. # Remove/slice the '0x' off the begining from using hex(). # use xor of 02 on the 2nd most significant hex char. # cast the hex string to an base-16 int for math safety. # remove the most common macaddr delimiters, dots, dashes, etc. #!/usr/bin/pythonĬonvert mac addr to ipv6 link local (rfc 4862) I'm using python 2.7, but my Linux distro is soon to switch to 3.x. is the code future proof to 3.4 python?Įspecially with casting a string to an int, and finally back to hex, seems overly weird.Īlso, I did recently discover some IP related factory functions, but so far I've not discovered any builtin way of doing this.is there a more pythonic way of doing this?.One of the ways I learn a new scripting language is to implement a subroutine to convert a network MAC addr into the IPv6 link-local address, as described in RFC 4862.

Convert mac address to hec